Amuse-Bouches V – What Makes a Trauma Traumatic? (Part II)
In Part I we looked at the history of trauma theory and framed its various debates against the backdrop of two key problems that any theory of trauma has...
Amuse-Bouches IV – What Makes a Trauma Traumatic? (Part I)
Trauma often appears to be a very broadly-spread notion in psychotherapy. Its urgency in clinical settings seems to outpace the theoretical rigour we can give it, leading the label...
The Unconscious of ‘Things’
We’re going to start with a naive question – what is the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious? This short article is about the unconscious of ‘things’, and if we think...
Amuse-Bouches III – The Obsessional Subjunctive
It is often said that psychoanalysts should look at structure, not surface symptoms, in order to make a clinical diagnosis. There are two problems with this. First, the definition...
VIDEO – What’s so Unconscious about the Unconscious?
A few months back I wrote a rather long article tracing the historical debate about the nature of the unconscious in psychoanalysis across three key turning points – 1915,...
Amuse-Bouches II – Testimony and the Pass
Who is ‘allowed’ to tell your story? Are you and you alone the only one that can represent your unique experience, past, and identity? Or is it sometimes okay...
Amuse-Bouches I – The Yerodia Case
This is Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi, helping Lacan into his car as he leaves his seminar in March, 1980. And this is Yerodia again, around the time of the international...
What’s so Unconscious about the Unconscious?
What does it mean to say that something is ‘unconscious’? The idea of the unconscious is the single biggest differentiator separating psychoanalysis from all other ‘psy-’ practices. Fidelity to...
Pornography and the Paradoxes of Pleasure – On the ‘Identity of Perception’
“It’s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it’s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I’d ever come...
Inside Out and the ‘Science’ of Emotions
No film in recent years has had quite as much input from the field of psychology as Disney and Pixar’s latest offering, Inside Out. Charming though the film is,...